Why Mercedes' enemies will rue their 2017 failure

"We have a motto in the team that the difficult days are the ones our competitors regret, because the painful experiences make you so much stronger. If you keep calm and analyse what happened, and try to improve, it just adds to your strength and knowledge."

This was Toto Wolff, speaking after his Mercedes Formula 1 team clinched its fourth consecutive constructors' championship crown at last year's United States Grand Prix. It's a mantra that underpins the way F1's current top team operates - a forensic approach to identifying weaknesses and obliterating them, leading the opposition to rue the day they dared threaten the Silver Arrows' lofty status as grand prix racing's dominant force.

Mercedes flirted closer to disaster in 2017 than at any other time during its recent reign at the top of F1. Early struggles under the newly enhanced aerodynamic regulations - rules Wolff feels were designed with the express aim of dethroning his team - presented an open goal for rivals to aim at. Ferrari came within a few Sebastian Vettel errors and freak engine failures of burying that chance, but Mercedes prevailed.

Last year's Mercedes began the season around 10kg overweight, thanks to the need to beef up aero parts that had disintegrated in testing, while the W08 also developed an unhealthy appetite for chewing through the softer range of Pirelli's new wider tyres, particularly the rears.

Mercedes hung on in the fight with Ferrari in the early races, while steadily and diligently working to rectify these problems. The team kicked on after the summer break, ultimately winning both championships in reasonable comfort. But the journey to get there was fraught with difficulty.

"Last year there were many cases where we had to make compromises with the set-up," says Valtteri Bottas. "It was quite difficult to get it in the right working range mechanically, and aerodynamically. Hopefully now we have a more complete package that is easier to set up to different conditions."

There was a certain element of 'the Lewis Hamilton factor' in play as Mercedes staved off challenges from Ferrari and Red Bull in the second half of 2017. Max Verstappen gave Hamilton a run for his money during the championship run-in, but in truth last year's Mercedes was still the grid's standout car - the fastest on the greatest proportion of circuits, even if it caused its team severe headaches on certain tyre compounds, on smooth track surfaces, and through low-speed cornering challenges. Red Bull boss Christian Horner has already voiced concern that improvements to the Mercedes chassis for '18, plus another round of substantial engine development, could leave the rest of the field trailing.

"If you look at the sheer statistics, the car was the fastest car, we had some amazing performances - Monza comes to my mind - and we had tracks where we didn't perform well and we couldn't understand the behaviour of the car," Wolff says. "We hope we keep the good character traits of the diva - we all like divas! Sometimes she was a bit difficult to understand, and this is the area where we worked the most - trying to understand and preserve what we have in terms of speed in the car and find more driveability."

There was some talk during the off-season about whether Mercedes might stray into Ferrari/Red Bull territory by adopting a shorter wheelbase and setting the car at a higher rear rideheight, to improve performance at its weakest circuits. The team conducted suspension experiments during practice for last year's Brazilian GP, apparently with this in mind, but things have ultimately moved in the opposite direction, with Ferrari in fact adopting a longer wheelbase for 2018.

Mercedes has decided to stick rather than twist on its own design, retaining the same wheelbase while running only a slightly increased rake compared to 2017. "The long wheelbase is something we decided very early on was an asset to us, and I'm pretty sure we're still right on that," explains Mercedes technical director James Allison. "If you're pretty sure the wheelbase is an asset, then carrying it over is an absolute no-brainer.

"The rake of the car is just a thing you work on all the time. It's not so much you choose this path or that path - we try to make the mechanical grip part of our suspension work nicely with the aerodynamic package, and where we have the broad peak of our best rear-downforce performance is a little lower in rideheight than some other cars. The peak rear downforce moves up a little bit for this year's car, but we certainly won't be in the sort of rake territory that we saw Red Bulls and co in last year."

"We had to ignore a lot of what we thought were standard ways of race engineering a car and go in the opposite direction" James Allison on understanding Mercedes' 2017 F1 car

Mercedes has been working on rectifying the weaknesses of its first stab at these current aerodynamic regulations since "before Monaco last year", according to Allison, and there is already some quiet confidence that Mercedes will be more competitive on the Monaco, Hungary, Singapore-style twisty circuits that have been its Achilles' heel in recent seasons.

"We could go from a race where we breezed off into the distance and then two weeks later find ourselves on the back foot and having a hard weekend," Allison adds. "We had to look very closely at what it was about - what was it about our car, what was it about the sequence of corners, the challenge of those circuits, that made it fly in one place and be a fight in the next? That involved a lot of simulation, a lot of calculation, a lot of improved fidelity of modelling, because our initial models just gave us no clue. But the goad of losing drives you to understand - to improve the modelling, to start to see patterns or physical explanations that match the patterns we saw on the track.

"One of the things that was hard about last year's car is that it was confusing for the engineers and the drivers in the early part of the season, because it seemed to be speaking to us to take a certain course of action with it, but if you followed those voices it was a siren path that definitely dragged you onto the rocks!

"Actually, we had to ignore a lot of what we thought were the standard ways of race engineering a car and go off in pretty much the opposite direction. Once we got a handle on that, our season became easier to execute, but we would like a set of circumstances that are easier to interpret. Hopefully, we've understood enough to make the changes to make that a reality."

Hamilton certainly seems satisfied with how intently Mercedes has listened to the drivers' concerns with last year's car and interpreted them into this year's, describing how the team's particular struggles in high-downforce trim in Malaysia last season informed the design direction of the W09.

The addition of the weight of the halo could potentially concern a team that struggled with weight for parts of last season, while the extra aggression of Pirelli's softer tyre choices for 2018 - "very fragile" and can only take "one or two laps", according to Bottas - don't automatically favour a team that tends to be stronger on the harder compounds in the V6 era. But those are details to be discovered and ironed out during the rest of winter testing as conditions improve, and Mercedes can still count on its trusty ace in the hole - that all-powerful V6 hybrid engine that has consistently set the standard in F1 since those rules were introduced.

The W09 features some impressively tight and tidy packaging around the engine, with engine chief Andy Cowell describing intense work undertaken at his facility in Brixworth to help the Brackley aerodynamicists deliver what Allison calls a "non-trivial amount of performance to the car".

In a season when only three engines are permitted for each driver, and the number of some associated ERS components allowed have been halved - provoking howls of protest from Renault customer teams Red Bull and McLaren about the rules being anti-competitive - how well Mercedes does in achieving greater durability without compromising performance could prove decisive in the championship battle yet again.

"We focused on trying to increase the life of the hardware without losing performance," says Cowell, who calculates the engines will each need to complete 40% greater distance than last season. "We also wanted to change the packaging of the power unit for the benefit of overall car performance. We've been working very closely with our colleagues in Brackley, trying to understand the best overall integration in the chassis, the transmission and the aerodynamic surfaces.

Mercedes' marginal improvements add up to one mightily impressive championship favourite

"We've also been working on combustion efficiency and hardware friction reduction, in partnership with Petronas. Pretty much all the part numbers are new, but the designs are always an evolution of what you've got previously. It's still a V6 direct-injected, 100kg [fuel] an hour, 120kW MGU-K, but everything is tweaked to be happier, high-life and tweaked to have better efficiency throughout that life."

When Cowell explains how his team attempted to meet those targets, it becomes clear how that forensic approach to detail runs through the core of the Mercedes operation and leads to the sort of excellence, and therefore dominance, we have seen in F1 over the past four seasons.

"What we don't want to do is make things bigger - we don't want bearings that are bigger to survive the distance; we don't want to cool everything more to give us that extra life," Cowell adds. "It's achieved by clever detail design, different materials, different coatings, different manufacturing processes, and understanding where you are today.

"This is the fifth year of these technical regulations and we're going into that extra-fine detail to find marginal gains. There's improved combustion efficiency, there's improved friction, but there's far greater detail of the beast that we've been racing with, and making sure the drawings focus on the tolerance that matters, the manufacturing processes hit that consistently - and we build consistently, test and operate consistently at the circuit.

"Every time we make a big change there's always opportunity to do things better, and what we've tried to do is accommodate some reasonably large integration changes. But with our simulation being better, what can we do to make the flow in the exhaust pipes better? How do we make the cooling in the cylinder heads better? If we're making changes, let's refine all the good bits. You look at that and think, 'It's only two milliseconds', but you do it in 10 places and it's 20 milliseconds."

It's this kind of collection of marginal improvements that add up to one mightily impressive championship favourite. Wolff contends that stable engine regulations will continue the sort of performance convergence we saw between Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault through 2017: "I expect 2018 to be a year where clearly at least three of the current manufacturers - Renault, Ferrari and Mercedes - are going to be on very equal performance" and he says Mercedes is "taking everybody seriously at this stage".

But if Mercedes has achieved its winter aim of making F1's fastest and most reliable car even more reliable, faster, and easier to make fast on a greater number of circuits, Wolff's rivals could well be in for a long and chastening 12 months. Mercedes has well and truly laid down the gauntlet again. Time for the rest to respond.